Thursday, April 4, 2013

Bali: Nusa Dua

Hey y'all... back in Jakarta after a long weekend of fun in the sun.

Our trip started with me joining Tim while his conference (which was at a big hotel in Nusa Dua, Bali) wrapped up. Not gonna lie... I'm not a huge fan of the Nusa Dua area, which is on Bali's southern peninsula. It's beautiful, but it's where many of the huge resort hotels are and it's a little bit sanitized/segregated/not really Bali. Plus you have to go through like 5 layers of security to even get into the area (security was particularly high because Indonesia's president was in the area for another conference that week).

That said, the beach in front of the hotel has a really cool super low tide thing going on... the water pulled way out past a break, leaving these little tide pools and cool ripples in the sand. It reminded me a bit of being on the Cape Cod bay when I was a kid- the water would recede and you could walk out for what seemed like miles, checking out the critters floating and/or crawling on the sand.

Around the corner from our hotel there was an outcropping of lava rock (the sharp, jagged kind... they call it a'a in Hawaii, but I'm not sure if there is a word for it in Bahasa Indonesia?) at the ocean's edge where the water spouts up in a cool way. The area is funnily labeled, "Water Blow" (maybe they were going for blow hole?):

There were a couple of kids have a blast watching the water shoot up... I captured them getting totally soaked and loving it:

I wouldn't count out the fast boat entirely. We heard (after the fact) that the fast boats from Amed (rather than from Sanur, where we caught it) are much faster/easier... you'd have to drive a bit further on Bali, so it's six of one, half dozen of the other to a certain extent. I think it would be much better that what we did because there is no extra stop at Nusa Lembongan.